"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

May 10, 2012 (Happy birthday, Keith!)

The following are items that make me proud, happy, excited, and fulfilled in a way that only can be done by those particular things in life that above all else make you think, "Worth every penny!":

• My computer privacy screen
• Movers
• Polarized lens sunglasses
• Tubbo.com

Fatty is worth every damn penny that was spent on him because of games like last night. Because of games like the 2009 playoffs. Because he makes sure that the Yanks never have to slump for longer than a few days.

He went up against David Price and I'm pretty sure that he will retain "up-and-coming rookie" status approximately forever. Seriously, wasn't he a promising young star like 5 years ago? At what point is he just going to have to settle for being David Price, the Pretty Great Pitcher in the Majors?

The Yanks won in a very neatly packaged game, good solid shots from our offense and a long, 10K outing from the Round Mound. Grandy and Cano went yard, and Chris Steward (who is a catcher) drove in a ribbie along with A-Jones.


Good book.

I watch every single Yankee game, and still I cannot figure out for the life of me the difference between Nunez and Chavez. And why is Ibanez like Jordan Catalano in My So Called Life, who only seems to mysteriously just miraculously appear?

Why is this so difficult for me? I now understand why my parents, for the past 26 years, have never called me or my sisters the right name on the first try. They always manage to go through the 2 wrong ones first before they land on the right one. I sort of get it now. Chavez-Nunez-Ibanez.

Z-1 of Z-Pak fame was back in the swing of things. Literally he was only back when it came to the swing of things, because in terms of the fielding of things, he wasn't looking so hot. He wasn't the one who got whiplash, right?

That is a legitimate question. Because he certainly fields like it. He misplayed a ball again, which is now becoming something like a Windows Macro autocorrect as soon as I write "Nunez" it immediately switches it to "Nunez misplayed a ball in the outfield."

Maybe it'll be like a Melky situation though. I remember seeing Melky play the outfield for the first time ever when Laur and I went to Old-Timers Day years ago.

He was a mess.

Like he played right field very much the way you expect the chick to play right field in a softball game. The one who doesn't know what hand her mitt goes on and who "tries" to catch every fly ball by sticking her glove up in a basket fashion...while moving aside and out of reach of the ball.

But then Melky became a defensive god. So..is there hope for Nunez? I don't think so. I wouldn't be surprised if you start seeing outlines of soap bars emblazoned over his bodice sometime within the next week.

In all seriousness though, autocorrect gets more and more aggressive every year, and not in a good way. It used to be like T9 predictive text would just be there to support you, and it wouldn't try to upstage you by changing words like "train" to "mesosophocles."

Now it's ridiculous. Even when I try to erase an autocorrect, it continues to stubbornly insist upon it. And the #1 most aggravating example of this is changing "Mo" to "Month." Between Mo my cat and Mo my baseball hero, there's a fair amount of mobile exchange on "Mo" which means there's a boatload of texts like "Going out to get food for Month. Call you when I'm done." Or "I'm so f'n tired of people saying Month is done."

Anyways, Nunez screwed up in the outfield in addition to making a throw that was so bad you'd have thought Knoblauch had taken it upon himself to do a "celebrity toss," a la beirut style.

But that was defense. At the plate, he singled a couple of times, walked, and then stole a bunch of bases.Maybe not a bunch, but 2, so..semantics. He's an odd one to figure out, that Z-man.

Or, as Girardi so aptly applied what I can only assume are teachings from a Learning Annex class on PR, Nunez had a "tough night." Even better, he noted that the Yankees may have to reassess how they use Nunez on defense. Hilarious. He's like the kid in the office who gets hired to change the Poland Spring bottle, by he keeps knocking it over.

So instead of being like, You're not good at what we hired you for, so why do we have to bend over backwards to find a more useful skill set? they're like, "Um let's reevaluate how he's used in a water cooler capacity, yeah?"

Yeah, Girardi is like turning into David Cone in a "I'm forgetting what level of appropriate I'm supposed to be speaking to" kind of way. He makes the astute observation last tnight that "CC seems to be the big guy latesly."

What does this even mean? He's been fat since ever. And good for just as long. What rock has Joe been living under?

Actually, the funniest part of the game was the collection of Devil Rays who acted like they were auditioning for bit parts as "Temper-tantrum-throwing-guy-#1." Fatso whiffed a bajillion (10) batters, but the greatest performance came from Carlos Pena who flung his bat like it was a javelin. I guess he figured if he couldn't put some distance on the ball, that the bat was the next best thing.

Why, by the way, is Pena of all people getting incensed over a strikeout when basically he has carved out a very special niche for himself as the new Richie Sexson?

If your mom's life depended on it, would you bet that a) Carlos Pena averages at least 1.5 Ks a game in the span of 5 games... or that b.) he doesn't. He's got 21 career K's against Tubbo (batting .136), and he acts like just because he got the better of him on opening day, that now he's justified in getting all sorts of cranky when he reverts to form.

Carlos Pena is the worst fantasy player ever. Ever. I don't care what he does for the rest of his career, he has terrorized millions of fantasy teams for years, and for that he deserves our utmost ire, and when appropriate, our utmost ridicule.

So far the Yankees have only lost one game of the six I predicted they'd win. But they also have 3 left (one of which I'll be attending with Strange, score!) so, as the often unreasonably giddy Yes announcers would say, "the Yankees have 'em RIGHT where they want 'em!"

They do. It's true. We're playing the same team that picked up Oliver Perez. On purpose.